April 2001 University Reporter

Presentations, Conferences, and Lectures

In Moscow on March 2 - 11, Edmund Beard, director of the McCormack Institute, presented support for a proposal to conduct a major, three-year project to strengthen the Russian Judiciary to the US Agency for International Development. He also delivered a public lecture at the Russian State University of Management.

Linda Eisenmann of the Graduate College of Education addressed the topic “Advocacy, Research, and Service for Women: The Pioneering Origins of the Center for the Education of Women” at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Education of Women. The lecture will be published as an occasional paper by the Center.

Carol Ellenbecker of the Department of Adult and Gerontological Nursing gave a presentation on health policy to nurse educators visiting from Japan. Harumi Mihara, director of the Boston Nursing Training Center, arranged the meeting in response to Japanese interest in graduate advanced practice programs and the health policy focus at UMass Boston’s nursing Ph.D. program.

Shelley Foster, Chemistry Department, presented at the American Chemical Society’s National Meeting in April held in San Diego. Several undergraduate and graduate UMass Boston students attended.

Sociology faculty members presented papers at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society in Philadelphia on March 4. Stephanie Hartwell presented “Mentally Ill Offenders in the Criminal Justice System.” Siamak Movahedi presented “Perceptual Filters of Violence: The Case of Diallo’s Murder,” and “Nationalism and Patterns,” which was coauthored with Russell Schutt. Schutt presented his coauthored paper, “Prevention Practices in Homeless Shelters and Day Programs.”

Adrian K. Haugabrook, assistant dean of student affairs, was lead presenter with Thara Fuller, program coordinator for NERCHE, and Lisa Gonsalves, associate provost, at the American Association for Higher Education National Conference on Higher Education in Washington, D.C. on March 25. Their session was entitled “Academic Affairs and Student Affairs in Partnership: A Model Approach toward Embracing Student Learning.”

In February, Peter Taylor of the Graduate College of Education led a faculty workshop on “Fostering Critical Thinking with Attention to the Inter- and Intrapersonal,” for the Center for Excellence in Teaching at Oregon State University. He also spoke on a panel on the future of teaching thinking at the March ASCD conference in Boston.

David Terkla, Economics Department, was the opening speaker at “Mature Workers: The Driving Force of the New Millennium, Part II,” this year’s New England Mature Workers Conference, at the World Trade Center on April 9.

Brian Thompson, professor of French and director of Le Centre National de la Chanson, organized six area concerts with French singer-songwriter Eric Vincent. Thompson will attend three conferences in France celebrating the birth of André Malraux and is coorganizing a fourth to be held at Harvard University in December.

Gerontology faculty members and students presented at the Joint ASA and NCOA Conference held in New Orleans on March 8 – 11. Presenters included Nina Silverstein, associate professor and director of the undergraduate program, Jenai Murtha, doctoral student, Tamara Harden, Ph.D. candidate, Ellen Bruce, associate director, and Yung-Ping (Bing) Chen, the Frank J. Manning eminent scholar’s professor in gerontology

Carole Upshur, director of the Public Policy Doctoral Program, was recently appointed to the conference planning committee for the annual meeting of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, to be held in Washington, DC, in November 2001.

Carole Upshur, along with Gonzalo Bacigalupe of the GCOE, and Dharma Cortes, Juan Carlos Gorlier, and Miriam Chernoff, all of the Gastón Institute’s Hispanic Health Services Research project, delivered a workshop on methods to identify minority health consumer access and quality issues at the regional Minority Health Conference in Nashua, NH.

College of Nursing Professor Lin Zhan presented “Ethno-Cultural Research: Concepts and Methods” at Boston College School of Nursing on February 26.

Publications

Albert P. Cardarelli, director of the Center for Policy Research in Family and Community Violence, has written a chapter, “Intimate Partner Violence,” which will be published in the book Criminology for the Millennium: Essays in Honor of Marvin E. Wolfgang in August.
Maurice Cunningham, chair of the Political Science Department, has published his book Maximization, Whatever the Cost: Race, Redistricting, and the Department of Justice. The book examines Justice Department policies in the 1990s that forced states to maximize the number of minority congressional districts.

Political Science’s Kathleen Hartford recently published American Politics and International Relations on the Internet: The Smart Student’s Guide. Hartford will be conducting research for her next book, on the ‘informationization’ of China, while teaching American and comparative politics to Chinese graduate students in Nanjing.

Richard Horsley of the Study of Religion Program recently completed two publication projects, editing and contributing to Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation, and coediting and contributing three articles to the double issue of “Slavery in Text and Interpretation” in the experimental journal Semeia.

Nancy Lovejoy of the Department of Adult and Gerontological Nursing was awarded the Susan Baird Excellence in Writing Award for Clinical Practice for her article “Cancer-Related Depression: Part I - Neurologic Alterations and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy,” published in Oncology Nursing Forum. Margherite Matteis, Department of Community and Family Nursing, and Derek Tabor, now a UMass Boston College of Nursing alumnus, coauthored the paper.
The Music Department’s Jon Mitchell published his paper “The Kneller Hall Archives II: The Eckersberg and Sommer Collections” in the IGEB Kongressbericht: Banska Bystrica proceedings.

Gopal Rao of the Physics Department published “Nonvolatile Grating in an Azobenzene Polymer with Optimized Molecular Reorientation” in the February 26 issue of Applied Physics Letters. His article discusses the technique’s advantages in storing information that can be read repeatedly without erasing.

William Robinson, professor in the Environmental, Coastal and Ocean Sciences Department, and doctoral student Satish Nair published “Histidine-Rich Glycoprotein in the Blood of the Bivalve Mytilus Edulis: Role in Cadmium Speciation and Cadmium Transfer to the Kidney” in Aquatic Toxicology.

James Willis, assistant professor of sociology, has coauthored an article, “Styles of Patrol in a Community Policing Context,” which will be published as a chapter in the forthcoming The Transformation to Community Oriented Policing: Strategies for Change, edited by M. Morash and J.K. Ford.

Performances

The UMass Boston Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Jon Mitchell, gave a salon concert on March 16 at the New School of Music in Cambridge. Music Department faculty member Linnea Bardarson was the featured piano soloist.

Grants

Alexia Pollack, assistant professor of biology, was awarded the Joseph P. Healey Grant of $2,600 for her proposal “Role of D2 and D3 Dopamine Receptors in the Enhanced Response Observed in a Rat Model of Parkinson’s Disease.”

Gopal Rao of the Physics Department was awarded two-year grant of $125,000 by DARPA for the research project “Optical Correlator Based on Biomolecular Materials.”

Marietta Schwartz, Chemistry Department, is the co-principal investigator on a $478,579 NSF grant project entitled “Interactive Organic Chemistry Learning on the World Wide Web.” The grant, shared with UMass Amherst, supports the development of an organic chemistry database, which will include guided discovery modules, intelligent tutors, and graded homework for a variety of organic chemistry topics.

Miren Uriarte, acting director of the Gastón Institute, and Carole Upshur, director of the Public Policy Doctoral Program, recently obtained $145,000 in continuation funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation to evaluate various Casey-funded projects in the Dudley Street area of Roxbury.

Appointments and Honors

Alfred P. Cardarelli, senior fellow at the McCormack Institute of Public Affairs, has been appointed director of the Center for Policy Research in Family and Community Violence in the College of Arts and Sciences. The Center is affiliated with the Department of Sociology, where Cardarelli will assume a faculty position.

Goldie Lengel was presented with an Office of the Dean of Students Recognition award in appreciation for her service to UMass Boston as acting director for Health Services from 1998 – 2001 on March 2.

Three 2001 Research Fellows at the Institute for Asian American Studies were named: Marlene Kim, assistant professor of economics, will explore wage penalties for Asian American workers; Michael Liu, research associate, will conduct a survey of East Coast Asian American activism; and Rachel Rubin, assistant professor of American Studies, will examine Asian American cultural expressions in cyberzines.

Lois Rudnick, director of the American Studies Program, received The Council for American Studies Education Distinguished Service Award from an urban/suburban coalition of Chicago-area secondary school educators at their February conference.

Karen O’Connor, executive director of the Massachusetts Field Center for Teaching and Learning at the Graduate College of Education, has been appointed cochair of the National Staff Development Council’s December 2002 national conference, to be held in Boston.

Dissertations

Christopher Rockett, Ph.D. candidate in gerontology, defended the dissertation “Community Support for Older Adults with Mental Retardation and Their Families: A Comparison of States: Family Support Programs,” on April 11.

Chanyeong Kwak, Ph.D. candidate in gerontology, defended the dissertation “Factor Influencing Informal and Formal Long Term Care in Community Dwelling Elders: Age 70 and Older,” on April 13.

Visiting Lectures

Composer Henry Brant visited UMass Boston on Wednesday, March 14 through the Share-a-Composer consortium. He addressed advanced music theory and ear training classes in the Music Department.

In February, Pulitzer-prize winning historian William S. McFeely conducted two classes in the College of Public and Community Service life histories course taught by James Green. McFeely worked with students who were reading and writing about The Narrative of the Life Frederick Douglass, as well as McFeely’s own biography of Douglass.

On March 14, the McCormack Institute hosted a seminar featuring Alexander Oslon, director of the largest private survey research firm in Russia. Oslon’s talk focused on the utilization of the Internet, politics, and public opinion in Russia today.

In the News

On March 9, the Joiner Center’s Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung were interviewed by Robin Young on WBUR’s “Here and Now” program. They discussed participation in the Cambridge Poetry Festival, where both appeared on a panel on translation and offered readings of their own work and of Vietnamese poets on March 11.

Maurice Cunningham, Political Science Department, spoke with the Ottoway News Service on March 13 concerning congressional redistricting nationally and in Massachusetts.
Diane Paul of the Political Science Department discussed eugenics and controlling human heredity on WCVB’s Chronicle on March 19.

Elizabeth Sherman, McCormack Institute, was featured on ABC World News tonight with Peter Jennings on March 15 discussing Jane Swift’s impending birth of twins and appointment to the governorship of Massachusetts.

Birth

College of Management Associate Professor of Accounting and Finance Thomas Hogan and his wife Barbie are the proud parents of first-born daughter Emily Katherine Ann on February 26.

Obituary

Alice Trost, assistant professor in the Department of Economics, died on March 2 following a battle with brain cancer. Trost had taught at UMass Boston since 1992. She published a version of her award-winning dissertation in her book, Employment and the Urban Poor: The Impact of Job Relocation.

Miscellaneous

David Patterson of the Music Department had his CD Saving Daylight Time, which includes a song setting of a poem by Lloyd Schwartz, featured on a listening station at Boston’s Tower Records during the month of February. In March, Cambridge Community Television aired Katherine Prins’ piece, “Spotlight on David Patterson.”

Lovalerie King, English Department, was included among guests Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Oprah Winfrey, Chinua Achebe, and Jessye Norman at a tribute celebrating Toni Morrison on her 70th birthday, held at the New York Public Library on February 17.

The Labor Resource Center of CPCS is working with artist Joshua Sarantitis to develop a limited edition art piece depicting the hopes and history of the labor movement in Massachusetts. The Center will unveil the project at a special reception in June.

March Corrections

Hipólito Mejía, president of the Dominican Republic, was incorrectly identified as Ramírez Hipólito Mejía on page 2.

Arlene Costello is a member of the Facilities Department, not the Registrar’s Office as noted in the Ice Cream Social photo caption on page 3.

On Page 7, in the Who’s Who article, Collis Brown was misidentified as winner of the “Outstanding Future Professional” award of the Massachusetts Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance. Brown was nominated for that award, which was won by fellow student Eugene Metto.

Campus Notes